Franz Kafka’s badly healed wounds

Franz Kafka’s badly healed wounds

 

by CAROLIN DUTTLINGER

 

 

The Times Literary Supplement

Published: 24 June 2015

Franz Kafka c.1898 Photograph: © Apic/Getty Images

 

 

 

Prague, mid-1880s. A young boy has been keeping his parents awake by repeatedly asking for water; exasperated, his father picks him up and carries him to the communal balcony (or Pawlatsche), where the child is left for a while, dressed only in his nightshirt.

 

 

 

This episode forms the dramatic climax of Franz Kafka’s “Brief an den Vater” (“Letter to his Father”), a lengthy epistle in which the thirty-six-year-old writer takes stock of his relationship with his father, Hermann. As cases of child mistreatment go, the incident is certainly harmless; indeed, Kafka concedes that Hermann used physical punishment only sparingly. The threat of violence, however, was ubiquitous, and the Pawlatsche episode embodied this traumatic sense of exposure: “For years to come I suffered agonies when I imagined how this giant man, my father, the ultimate authority, would come, for practically no reason, and carry me from my bed to the Pawlatsche at night, and that I was such a nothing to him”. The charge, then, is not physical but psychological cruelty: a lack of empathy and affection combined with techniques of intimidation, which, however transparent, had a lasting impact on the child.

 

 

 

Hermann Kafka never got to read this letter. Instead, it has become the closest we have to Kafka’s memoirs, a story of mutual misunderstanding and alienation, charted in a series of evocatively sketched scenes: father and son at the swimming pool, the little boy feeling dwarfed by his father’s powerful physique; at the dinner table, where Hermann lectures his children about table manners which he himself cheerfully ignores; and, some years later, Hermann bluntly telling his adolescent son to visit a prostitute to quell those irksome physical urges. The letter, then, is less a source of factual information than a psychological portrait of Kafka’s early years. For all its power of psychological analysis – the tone is rarely self-pitying but almost forensically detached – it is a carefully constructed document, which shows off Kafka’s superior rhetorical skills: his method of dialectical analysis and his masterful use of understatement. The fact that Kafka nearly always gives his father the benefit of the doubt, scrupulously casting around for attenuating circumstances, makes his accusations all the more devastating.

 

 

 

The letter’s impact on Kafka scholarship, on perceptions of the man and his work, cannot be overstated. Peter-Andre Alt, in his biography Kafka: Der ewige Sohn (Kafka: The eternal son, 2005), uses it as a template, arguing that Kafka never really outgrew the – literal as well as figurative – role of the son; thus Alt casts even Kafka’s last lover, the twenty-six-year-old Dora Diamant, as a mother substitute. For all its erudition, Alt’s 750-page biography pales in comparison with Reiner Stach’s rival project, begun in the mid-1990s, which explores the forty years of Kafka’s life in three volumes totalling 2,000 pages. In response to the inaccessibility of certain documents, particularly the Brod bequest, Stach started his project with the well-documented middle period (Die Jahre der Entscheidungen, 2002; The Decisive Years, 2005), then moving on to his later years (Die Jahre der Erkenntnis, 2008; The Years of Insight, 2013). The present volume, Die frühen Jahre (The Early Years), which charts Kafka’s childhood and adolescence, his university years and first employment, concludes the trilogy.

 

 

 

By reconstructing moments of crisis that have left no traces in Kafka’s texts, Reiner Stach makes the silence surrounding them speak all the more loudly

 

 

 

The sheer size of his project gives Stach scope to go further and dig deeper than previous biographers. Whole stretches of Kafka’s early life remain shrouded in obscurity; there are no surviving diaries and only a few letters from the time before 1910, for Kafka regularly destroyed batches of his own manuscripts, diaries and letters. The biographer thus needs to draw on contextual materials: on school reports, viva transcripts and the recollections of contemporaries. Stach’s narrative is the result of years of archival research, and he is scrupulous in laying open the gaps in his material. Rather than resorting to conjecture to fill these gaps, he uses a combination of literary techniques and historical contextualization to bring events vividly, and often spectacularly, to life.

 

 

 

The two opening chapters, forming a kind of diptych, are a case in point. The story begins on July 3, 1883, Kafka’s birthday. It is a hot summer day, and the people of Prague are flocking to the beer gardens. Their monarch, Kaiser Franz Josef I, is on a visit to Graz, where he attends Mass and visits the local shooting club. And yet this seemingly uneventful day marks a turning point in political history. For the first time, elections for the Bohemian parliament resulted in a Czech majority, and contemporaries were quick to recognize the significance of this day for Austria–Hungary, a multi- ethnic state governed by a German-speaking elite.

 

 

 

Tracing the roots of this conflict between Czechs and Germans, Stach’s curtain goes up again in the early seventeenth century. In November 1620, the Protestant Bohemian estates were defeated by the Catholic Habsburgs at the Battle of the White Mountain. on June 21, 1621, the twenty-seven leaders of the Czech revolt – noblemen, clerics, knights and burghers – were executed on a specially built platform set up in Prague’s Old Town Square. A deafening drum roll accompanied the hangings and beheadings which went on for hours, drowning out the screams of the victims and their families. Though the politics underpinning these executions were in fact rather complex – a third of the rebels were German- speakers and one of them a Catholic, while the hangman was a Protestant – the events of June 1621 became etched into collective memory as a founding moment of the Czech nationalist movement. While this day cemented Habsburg rule for the three centuries that followed, the conflict between Czech- and German-speakers continued to flare up time and again, particularly in Prague, a city “marked by badly healed wounds”.

 

 

 

In this volatile climate, the position of the Jewish minority was highly precarious. Jews were subject to arbitrary and draconian measures, such as the Familiantengesetz (family law) of 1727, which allowed only the eldest son of a family to marry, thus freezing the number of Jewish families in Bohemia and Moravia until the mid-nineteenth century. The Jews living in the Prague ghetto, however, enjoyed a greater degree of religious and legal autonomy; their economic importance for the entire region ensured some measure of protection against anti-Semitism, although the threat of violence remained omnipresent well into Kafka’s lifetime. In 1897, Czech and German nationalists clashed over a piece of pro-Czech legislation. The initial attacks on German shops soon gave way to raids on Jewish businesses. As Stach notes, though the Jews were not the cause of these clashes “they were an inevitable target”. Luckily, the Kafkas’ haberdashery shop was spared, but it must have been a traumatic time for the family, whose entire fortunes were invested in the business. Kafka was fourteen at the time. There are no references to these raids anywhere in his writings, but here Stach’s technique of historical contextualization comes into its own. By reconstructing moments of crisis that have left no traces in Kafka’s texts, he makes the silence surrounding them speak all the more loudly.

 

 

 

The charge, then, is not physical but psychological cruelty: a lack of empathy and affection combined with techniques of intimidation, which had a lasting impact on the child

 

 

 

For the young Kafka, these raids would have been particularly memorable as they reflected a core aspect of his upbringing: a fundamental lack of security. Hard-working and ambitious, Hermann and Julie Kafka (née Löwy) steadily worked their way up the social ladder. From their first flat at the margins of the soon-to-be-demolished ghetto, the young family moved four times in as many years, while their business relocated twice before Franz started school. The recurring experience of being physically uprooted was mirrored in Franz’s personal environment. Julie Kafka helped her husband in the shop, which was open seven days a week. Franz and his three younger sisters were raised by a succession of nannies, governesses and other domestic servants. Kafka would later remember his mother as affectionate but physically and emotionally remote; the fact that his two younger brothers, Georg and Heinrich, both died in infancy must have further overshadowed his childhood. Even as their business grew steadily, the Kafkas never felt economically and socially secure, and were haunted by fear of failure, of slipping back into poverty. This sentiment is reflected in Kafka’s fiction, where the worries of the small businessman in a climate of aggressive capitalist competition are a recurring theme.

 

 

 

School opened up Kafka’s horizons beyond his home life, but also added to the many pressures facing him. The draconian German and Austrian school system is well documented in many works of the fin de siècle, among them Frank Wedekind’s scandalous drama Frühlings Erwachen (Spring Awakening), where the schoolboy Moritz Stiefel kills himself after failing his exams. It is a story that rang true for many contemporaries. one of Kafka’s schoolfriends, the rebellious Karl Kraus (a namesake of the Viennese satirist), ran away to set sail for America; he was caught in Hamburg and returned to school, but shot himself a year later. Another of Kafka’s school friends, the doctor’s son Camill Gibian, committed suicide while studying law at university. Kafka himself was a good and docile pupil; although he too lived in constant dread of failing his exams, he passed his Matura and in 1901 matriculated at the Charles University in Prague to study chemistry. Within just two weeks he switched to law, a move no doubt intended to please his parents. Kafka quickly realized that he wasn’t interested in law either, but he stuck with it, looking for intellectual stimulation elsewhere. Through a German student organization, he met a fellow law student, Max Brod, who would have a formative influence on his literary career both during his lifetime and beyond.

 

Kafka’s friendship with Brod is one of the most intriguing, and most underexplored, chapters of his biography. It is one of Stach’s great achievements to bring this friendship vividly to life. Brod came from a well-off family, and his parents encouraged him to pursue his many interests, from musical composition and philosophy to literature and journalism. He published his first novel at the age of twenty-four; by the age of thirty he had fifteen books to his name. But the great breakthrough never quite happened, and today Brod’s works are practically forgotten. Brod himself blamed incompetent publishers and hostile critics for his lack of success. Stach offers a different explanation. A precocious talent, Brod ultimately lacked the stamina to hone his abilities to the level of maturity. Instead, he poured his energy into networking and self-promotion, sustaining a tireless correspondence with fellow authors, editors and critics. As Arthur Schnitzler bluntly noted after meeting him in person: “Brod: a particularly ugly, inauthentic fellow devoured by ambition; played the enthusiast but is, despite his prospects and skills, ultimately a hopeless case”.

 

When it comes to Brod, Stach is no objective chronicler but wittily, sparklingly biased, though his account does not lack empathy. Brod’s childhood was overshadowed by disability – a deformity of the spine, which forced him to wear a metal corset until secondary school – but he overcame this and other obstacles with great determination. Kafka owed much to Brod’s drive and enthusiasm. It was Brod who suggested he keep a diary as regular writing practice, and it was with Brod’s help that in 1912 Kafka secured his first book contract, for the short prose collection Betrachtung (Meditation). on a deeper level, however, Kafka was surprisingly resilient to Brod’s machinations. The fame so craved by his friend was for Kafka a matter of almost complete indifference, and where Brod was bursting with confidence, Kafka remained self-critical to the point of self-effacement. When Brod tried to persuade Kafka to contribute his short text “Die Aeroplane in Brescia” (“The Aeroplanes at Brescia”) to one of his collections of essays, Kafka declined, noting in his diary: “[Brod] wants to include my ‘Brescia’ in his book. Everything that’s good within me resists this idea”. It remains unclear whether Kafka’s response stemmed from self-doubt, or whether it was a comment on the quality of Brod’s volume, which Kafka helped prepare.

 

For both friends, however, writing would remain a pastime. After graduating, Kafka took up his first post in Prague with the Trieste-based insurance company, Assicurazioni Generali, but soon grew disillusioned with the long hours and authoritarian working climate. In 1908 he moved to the Workers’ Accident Insurance Company, a post he secured with the help of the company director Otto Příbram, the father of a schoolfriend. Kafka was only the second Jewish employee to join the 260-strong workforce; positions in the civil service and comparable institutions were practically unobtainable for Jews, many of whom converted to Christianity for career reasons.

 

One of the main perks of the new job were its hours. Kafka’s working day ended at 2 pm; after a nap, he often wrote until late at night. And yet it would be wrong to picture the young Kafka tied to his desk, living a life of monkish isolation. He savoured the Prague nightlife, and was more at home in its cafés, bars and cinemas than in its theatres and concert halls. A particular attraction were the Weinstuben (wine bars) with their permissive atmosphere. Waitresses joined the guests at the tables, and there were private side rooms, though most guests didn’t come for sex but to eat, drink and flirt. Writing to Brod from his office on a Sunday morning, Kafka suggests they meet on Tuesday at 5 am to enjoy a spot of nightlife before going straight to work: “we could have the two girls as our first breakfast – the kind you’re so fond of”. Yet Kafka was not as hardened a womanizer as his letter suggests. A photo shows him – dapper with bowler hat – with the waitress Juliane “Hansi” Szokoll, with whom he had a passionate but unhappy love affair.

 

Brod was a constant companion not only on these nocturnal excursions but also on several trips abroad, to Germany and Switzerland, Italy and France, between 1909 and 1911. on the longest journey, which took them to Paris via Munich, Zurich, Lucerne and Milan, Kafka and Brod kept parallel diaries, which they intended to publish as a co-authored travelogue. Another plan was to write a travel guide, simply called Billig (“Cheap”), a kind of budget Baedeker. Though in the end neither project came to fruition, their travels were a high point of their friendship. Young, on regular incomes and unburdened by family responsibilities, they were closer than at any other point in their lives; as Brod recalls in his memoirs: “it was a great happiness to live in Kafka’s presence”. They soaked up the bustling atmosphere of Paris – its museums, theatres and brothels – but it was during a trip to Italy that they witnessed a unique technological spectacle. In September 1909, Kafka, Brod and Brod’s brother Otto cut short their holiday at Lake Garda to see the legendary Louis Blériot – the first pilot to cross the British Channel – in action at the airshow in Brescia.

 

The episode of Kafka and the Brods at the Brescia airshow is a perfect showcase for Stach’s dual talent as historian and storyteller. Time and again, he zooms in on moments in Kafka’s life, some of them scarcely documented, where biography and history intersect in poignant ways. Counteracting perceptions of Kafka as somewhat removed from the major events of his time, Stach shows how Kafka’s life story is closely entwined with the political, social and technological narratives that make up the fabric of modernity. For all its erudition, however, this remains a deeply intimate biography, which follows its protagonist in an empathetic, but never invasive, way. Twenty years in the making, Reiner Stach’s Kafka trilogy is by turns gripping, moving and entertaining. It is a true landmark of biographical scholarship.

 

Reiner Stach
KAFKA
Die frühen Jahre
607pp. Fischer. €34.
978 3 10 075130 0

Carolin Duttlinger is Associate Professor in German at the University of Oxford and Fellow of Wadham College. Her most recent books are The Cambridge Introduction to Franz Kafka, 2013, and Kafkas ‘Betrachtung’: Neue lektüren, which was published last year.